Guys, every day I browse these forums, and every time I play this great game, I hear people complaining about 'lag'. I totally understand what it is people are referring to, but I think we need to clarify what the various causes are and what the solutions are, since most people are getting confused about this.

Ping Lag

This is a general online gaming term, and refers to a situation where there is a delay between the actions of your character, and its impact on the environment. For example, shooting your gun at a target, and the hit being registered a fraction of a second later. This lag occurs because of ping which is the time in milliseconds for the round trip between when you do something on your computer, that data being sent to the server through your internet connection, registered, and the impact returned to your computer and displayed on your screen. The lower your ping, the less of this lag you experience, the higher your ping, the more lag you experience. To view your ping in real-time during a game, open the console (press ~ or TAB) and type 'Stat Net' (without quotes) to turn on/turn off a network statistics display. Alternatively you can just press F1 to see a rough indicator of your ping in the score table. To reduce your ping, see the Netspeed command in my America's Army Tweak Guide, and also refer to this Netspeed and Tickrate tutorial. Note that depending on your internet connection type, and the distance between you and the actual server, your ping may not be able to be reduced too much more. Importantly, If you have a low ping but your graphics feel slow or 'laggy', this is not Ping Lag, and shouldn't be referred to as 'lag'. It has nothing to do with your internet connection or the server, or high ping players on the server. This is graphical slowdown (see below).

Packet Loss

If you have a relatively low ping but you are experiencing a 'warping' effect, whereby walking forward a few steps sees you suddenly warp back to where you started, then you are getting packet loss. This means that some of the information being sent/received through your internet connection to the server is being lost en route, and has to be re-sent immediately. There are two causes of packet loss - client side and server side. Client side is your PC and your Internet Service Provider (ISP). If you experience packet loss on all servers, and in various games then the likely culprit is the setup of your modem/network card/adapter and/or your ISP may be having problems. Contact your ISP for correct setup details and also to determine whether they have a known issue. Most often packet loss is due to a particular server experiencing problems and dropping packets. Leave the server in question and/or contact the server admin if it's a private server to inform them of the problem.

Graphical Slowdown

If you have a low ping, but your graphics and controls feel 'laggy', especially during combat and heavy firing, you are experiencing a graphical slowdown. This is not based on your internet connection, it is directly the result of your system struggling to draw all the details and special effects on the screen. The only resolution to this issue is to optimize your system and settings (See my America's Army Tweak Guide) and also to consider upgrading your hardware. America's Army has various fixed settings which cannot be reduced beyond a certain point (even using tweaks or in-game settings). These require a great deal of computing power, and as new features are introduced into the game, like the recent Karma Physics engine in V2.1, you will need more computing power to keep up. Meeting the minimum system requirements will give you barely playable results, and often you will get very large slowdowns during intense battles or close quarter combat.

High Pingers are giving me the Lag!

This is blatantly untrue. High ping players joining a server may give a momentary ping spike, but once they are on the server, as annoying as it may be to see them warping about or running into walls, their ping does not impact directly on your ping in any significant way. The server allocates a set amount of bandwidth to each individual (Netspeed cap of 10,000bps), so again a player with a higher ping is not giving you lag. If you look at your Ping (press F1) and see that it is relatively low (i.e. below 200ms) then any lag you experience is because of graphical slowdown. If you're experiencing warping, that's packet loss and due to the server. If your ping is extremely high, and/or those of other players suddenly become quite high, then you may have a valid point in saying the server is laggy. However once again, this is not due to high ping individuals, since they cannot force a server to lag out. Note that virtually any time large numbers of people join/leave a server you will experience brief moments of ping spikes.

I hope this helps answer the literally hundreds of posts and in-game conversations on this topic, since I get very frustrated trying to convince people not to start votekicks on someone who has a 300 ping in a server "because he is lagging us all!!!!". I also find it very annoying when people with P41.6 or FX5200 graphics cards say "this server sucks...I'm lagging!!!!!"

Simple rule: Press F1 (or Stat Net) and check your ping. If it is low then any lag you experience is based on your machine and its graphics and detail settings, and/or programs running in the background. Check my guide and some of the tutorials and stickies in these forums for details on how to optimize your setup, but in the end if you keep experiencing lag with a low ping you will need to upgrade your hardware.

The end. Someone who's written a tweak guide for AA that definitely works has a merit, especially one good enough not only to be published, to be used by many players.

[quote="knightmare1972"][quote]But from another angle, why not have servers dedicated to high pings? Kind of like the 'minimum honor' there could be a 'minimum ping' requirement.[/quote]

Because NO ONE would play it because the game play would be crap. Hmmm, why would that be??

And LordHell is far from correct on his assumptions. His thinking is [TOS Violation] backwards. Everyone is chimming in with a fool.

I welcome the server set lag kick. Mine will be set to 300 no warnings.. Why do you think 90% of game servers have a Lag kick in the first place!! They just felt like adding extra code for nothing??[/quote]

You aren't thinking very far ahead are you? If there were high-ping-only servers then you wouldn't have to worry about high pingers on the low ping servers, now would you?

[quote="knightmare1972"][quote]But from another angle, why not have servers dedicated to high pings? Kind of like the 'minimum honor' there could be a 'minimum ping' requirement.[/quote]

Because NO ONE would play it because the game play would be crap. Hmmm, why would that be??

And LordHell is far from correct on his assumptions. His thinking is [TOS Violation] backwards. Everyone is chimming in with a fool.

I welcome the server set lag kick. Mine will be set to 300 no warnings.. Why do you think 90% of game servers have a Lag kick in the first place!! They just felt like adding extra code for nothing??[/quote]

You aren't thinking very far ahead are you? If there were high-ping-only servers then you wouldn't have to worry about high pingers on the low ping servers, now would you?

And if you want to kick people from your server with pings over 300 it would be trivial to do so outside of the AA server at the TCP level. At least on a unix box and some perl script. Sounds like you need to get to work!

[quote="knightmare1972"][quote]But from another angle, why not have servers dedicated to high pings? Kind of like the 'minimum honor' there could be a 'minimum ping' requirement.[/quote]

Because NO ONE would play it because the game play would be crap. Hmmm, why would that be??

And LordHell is far from correct on his assumptions. His thinking is [TOS Violation] backwards. Everyone is chimming in with a fool.

I welcome the server set lag kick. Mine will be set to 300 no warnings.. Why do you think 90% of game servers have a Lag kick in the first place!! They just felt like adding extra code for nothing??[/quote]

You aren't thinking very far ahead are you? If there were high-ping-only servers then you wouldn't have to worry about high pingers on the low ping servers, now would you?

And I don't think they would suck for all the reasons that LordHell wrote about; because the server wouldn't be as busy servicing the high demand cable connections. It would be better play overall for dialups.

And if you want to kick people from your server with pings over 300 it would be trivial to do so outside of the AA server at the TCP level. At least on a unix box and some perl script. Sounds like you need to get to work!

If your ping is extremely high, and/or those of other players suddenly become quite high, then you may have a valid point in saying the server is laggy. However once again, this is not due to high ping individuals, since they cannot force a server to lag out.

This is wrong. In another game that i wont mention, i was one of the jerks that created cheat clients. And i could literaly crash the server by causing it to lag hard enough. So i KNOW for a fact that the above is incorrect.

And dialup_death... Your 3 posts caused by LAG i'm sure, are what is short sighted. A group of dialup users all on the same server? They would get so frusterated that they would leave and go to another server to ruin their game....

If your ping is extremely high, and/or those of other players suddenly become quite high, then you may have a valid point in saying the server is laggy. However once again, this is not due to high ping individuals, since they cannot force a server to lag out.

This is wrong. In another game that i wont mention, i was one of the jerks that created cheat clients. And i could literaly crash the server by causing it to lag hard enough. So i KNOW for a fact that the above is incorrect.

And dialup_death... Your 3 posts caused by LAG i'm sure, are what is short sighted. A group of dialup users all on the same server? They would get so frusterated that they would leave and go to another server to ruin their game....

So you are saying that you know for a fact that this server has the same flaws and bugs as some other game that you were a jerk on? That is what I'm hearing here.

There is more than one way to write the code. Ghost Recon seems to keep everyone sync'd so one slow connection slows everyone down. From what I can tell, AA lets the model roll on past the slow link high pingers then yanks/warps them into the 'server present' when the connection allows. Thus the 'freezing' then 'warping' of high pingers. The busier the server is with fast connections, or low pingers, the less available it is for the slow connections when they are available. Think of it this way: a warehouse has 4 roads leading to it from N,S,E,W. The S road is a single lane potholed road. The other three are 8 lane highways. The 'players' are truckers bringing loads to the warehouse and there is one trucker per road. The trucker on the beat up road not only takes longer to get to and from his destination, but he has to wait longer at the dock because the warehouse has to prepare each outgoing load and stock each incoming load from all the trucks and this takes a lot of (server) time and because the other truckers are making their round trips much faster (say they can go back and forth 5 times for every time the slow route truck can go back and forth). So each time the beat road trucker arrives at the dock, he has to wait 15x longer to get loaded unloaded than if he were the only truck. If the other roads were beat up also then he'd have to wait a lot less because the other trucks would not be creating so much activity in the warehouse. Clear now?

Have you solved the >300 ping autokicker on your server yet? If you've been coding cheats , and not just downloading them, I'm sure you can handle it!

All the flaming on the first page made me laugh, I couldn't even read on I had to post. High ping DOES 'cause lag, maybe not from a Tech view, but more so from a GAMER VIEW. I don't care who you are, when you look at numbers one way, the result will have a margin of error big enough to surprize you. And same goes with lag, a 56ker can EASILY get this game from his recruiter you don't have to download. And they still suck server bandwidth, I don't care who says what, a lagger sucks bandwidth like... something that will get me in trouble... so quit looking at numbers, and listening to what other folks say, get out there and play on a server, when a lagger joins the server will seem to slow down, 'cause the server PC is looking for the client that just seems to have magically vanished, then appears, then vanished.

All the flaming on the first page made me laugh, I couldn't even read on I had to post. High ping DOES 'cause lag, maybe not from a Tech view, but more so from a GAMER VIEW. I don't care who you are, when you look at numbers one way, the result will have a margin of error big enough to surprize you. And same goes with lag, a 56ker can EASILY get this game from his recruiter you don't have to download. And they still suck server bandwidth, I don't care who says what, a lagger sucks bandwidth like... something that will get me in trouble... so quit looking at numbers, and listening to what other folks say, get out there and play on a server, when a lagger joins the server will seem to slow down, 'cause the server PC is looking for the client that just seems to have magically vanished, then appears, then vanished.

Read the following, a condensed thing from a giant quote up there.

PersianImmortal wrote:

High Pingers are giving me the Lag!

This is blatantly untrue. High ping players joining a server may give a momentary ping spike, but once they are on the server, as annoying as it may be to see them warping about or running into walls, their ping does not impact directly on your ping in any significant way. The server allocates a set amount of bandwidth to each individual (Netspeed cap of 10,000bps), so again a player with a higher ping is not giving you lag. If you look at your Ping (press F1) and see that it is relatively low (i.e. below 200ms) then any lag you experience is because of graphical slowdown. If you're experiencing warping, that's packet loss and due to the server. If your ping is extremely high, and/or those of other players suddenly become quite high, then you may have a valid point in saying the server is laggy. However once again, this is not due to high ping individuals, since they cannot force a server to lag out. Note that virtually any time large numbers of people join/leave a server you will experience brief moments of ping spikes.

If your ping is extremely high, and/or those of other players suddenly become quite high, then you may have a valid point in saying the server is laggy. However once again, this is not due to high ping individuals, since they cannot force a server to lag out.

This is wrong. In another game that i wont mention, i was one of the jerks that created cheat clients. And i could literaly crash the server by causing it to lag hard enough. So i KNOW for a fact that the above is incorrect.

No, it is correct. I know what I wrote, and both from personal experience and my knowledge of the game engine, I know for a fact that someone with a higher ping does not cause others to lag in America's Army. They dont "suck server bandwidth" that is a moronic statement. Ironically they use less bandwidth since they have a lower bps connection! Plus servers have a cap on bandwidth of 10000bps to each client, so you could be on cable or dialup, you can't "suck bandwidth"!

What you did (which is extremely stupid) is to flood the server, and yes that can cause the server to crash it. A lot like a denial of service attack on the internet. You didn't "lag it hard", because that implies you somehow simulated a high ping.

A high ping is caused by a variety of factors, and these are related to what the client experiences. For example, someone on a slow connection gets a high ping because they aren't getting all necessary data fast enough. Or they are a long way from the server and the data takes longer to get to them. But how does this affect other players on the server? It doesn't affect your data rate, it doesn't put greater stress on the server (higher bandwidth players such as cable players use more bandwidth), and it doesn't ruin the server's ticrate which is fixed.

What I find incredible is you guys are talking about pings of 300 or more being high enough to kick someone - what utter crap. If someone is pinging so high that they are warping around and running into walls (i.e. 1000+ ping) , then yes I would say that's annoying and the player is wasting thier time and yours. However someone with a 300 or 400 ping can play perfect well - I'm from Australia and I used to ping that high on dialup and play well too (I'm on 1.5mbps ADSL now, ping is ~190).

Just what this game needs - ignorant users who blame what is primarily their own systems lagging from graphical slowdown on some poor guy pinging a relatively normal 300 ping!

What causes lag is only temporary. It is not the high pingers, but high pingers being on server with low pingers. For a few moments, the server must balance the players, but then it becomes normal. After that, the ping only effects the pinger.

The presence of logos, URLs or other information identifying private companies or other non-federal entities does not constitute an endorsement by the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.